ACLU chief makes stop in Durango

Robert Galin/Durango Herald

“Religious liberty has not always been easy, and it has not always been consistent,” Nathan Woodliff-Stanley, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, said during an address Sunday to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Durango.

“Never take religious liberty for granted,” Nathan Woodliff-Stanley, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado told the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Durango at their regular Sunday service. “We don’t need to think alike to love alike.”

Woodliff-Stanley, who also is an ordained Unitarian minister, was appointed to head ACLU-Colorado last October. He was invited to Durango in part because of an opinion piece he wrote for The Denver Post in November, he said in an interview.

In his sermon Sunday, Woodliff-Stanley said, “Religious freedom is something I hope we never take for granted. The forebears of out faith certainly couldn’t take it for granted,” he told the congregation.

He then explained how the Unitarian church developed and the struggles it went through, much like the struggles of other faiths when they begin.

Woodliff-Stanley said that throughout history people have been forced to follow the religions of their leaders. If they didn’t it often meant they forfeited their lives, he said.

He noted that in the midst of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, there was one Unitarian king, John Sigismund of Transylvania, who decreed religious freedom. Sigismund established Unitarian congregations.

The term Unitarian means “the oneness of God,” according to the faith’s website.

“A good number of the people who fled Europe for the colonies that became the United States came here with religious freedom in mind,” he said. “But they were not all the same.”

Yet they also came to establish ideal religious communities, and they represented a variety of Protestant faiths, including Anglican, Calvinist, Quakers and Baptist, and there were Catholics and skeptics, like Thomas Paine.

America’s religious diversity also included the Native American spiritual beliefs and some of the religions brought by the African slaves, until they became Christianized, he said, noting Thomas Jefferson’s connection to Unitarianism.

Jefferson once expressed the belief that Unitarianism might become the faith of the country, according to the Thomas Jefferson Monticello website. Jefferson did not believe in the Trinity or in Jesus as divine, but, in “a letter to William Short on Oct. 31, 1819, he was convinced that the fragmentary teachings of Jesus constituted the ‘outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man’,” according to the website. Short was Jefferson’s private secretary when the latter was ambassador to France.

Woodliff-Stanley said in early America, the Baptists were among the strongest supporters of separation of church and state.

He noted many beliefs exist in the U.S. today and said, “for the most part, we don’t kill each other.”

Many European states, which have official religions, are actually more secular, he said.

American religiosity is tied to the freedoms that Americans can believe as they see fit, he said.

But he said, “Religious liberty has not always been easy, and it has not always been consistent,”

For example, even though there is no religious test for public office, “it is nearly impossible to be elected to office almost anywhere in the United States if you are an atheist or if you are a follower of almost any non-Christian religion,” he said.

Woodliff-Stanley said he probably spends more time on religious-liberty issues at the ACLU than any other topic.

Religion can be used to deny constitutional rights to a variety of people, including the lesbian-bisexual-gay-transgender community, just as it was used to deny blacks their rights before the passage of the civil-rights laws, he said.

“Whatever religious liberty means,” Woodliff-Stanley said, “it cannot mean the ability to impose religious practices on those who may not share the same religious beliefs.”

In his sermon Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Durango, Nathan Woodliff-Stanley, American Civil Liberties Union executive director and Unitarian minister, said the Constitution was adopted as a purely secular document. There is no mention of God or anything supporting a specific faith in it.

“The new Constitution was the most powerful statement on religious liberty that the world had ever seen,” he told the congregation.

In fact, Woodliff-Stanley said, there are only two mentions of religion in the Constitution.

One is in the First Amendment, which says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof .... ”

The second is in Article VI, which says, “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

From the beginning of the United States, there were “nods” to religion, such as on the currency and prayers in Congress. There also was the inclusion in 1954 of “under God” to Pledge of Allegiance in response to the Communist scares led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, he said.

Woodliff-Stanley said Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that it would be constitutional for states to declare an established religion, and North Carolina legislatures tried just that earlier this year.

He also mentioned a poll that suggested one-third of Americans would support an amendment to make Christianity the nation’s official religion, though which version of Christianity would be open to debate.

“Religion does shape our society, often for the better,” Woodliff-Stanley said. “And there is nothing wrong with our faith informing our political choices.

“But that opportunity to have a voice should be available to all,” he said.

He said he supports the exercise of all beliefs, but the establishment of none as a state religion.

He also said churches and other religious institutions benefit greatly from the separation of church and state.